Starring: Gerard Butler, Emmy Rossum, Patrick Wilson (I)

4 out of 10: We can do it any way you want. I can hold director Joel Schumacher's arms and you punch, or you can hold `em and I'll punch. But somebody's got to do some punching.

Or, maybe it's Andrew Lloyd Webber, the creator of the musical "Phantom of the Opera" we should blame with this boring, lifeless movie that many of us have waited years and years for. After all, he hand-picked Schumacher to make it.

Whoever's at fault, The Phantom of the Opera, unlike the chandelier at the beginning of the musical, never lights up and never rises. This familiar scene does indeed start the film version, in 1919, as an auction company is selling off items from the Paris Opera House. Attending the auction is the Vicompte de Chagny (Patrick Wilson), now an old man, but, in his younger days known as Raoul (and known for wearing unlaced puffy shirts). As the auctioneer sets up the bidding for the chandelier—specially wired for the "new electric light"--it mysteriously begins to shake and elevate.

As the chandelier rises the film flashes back to 1870. Young, puffy-shirt Raoul is the dashing new underwriter of the Paris Opera House, which has two, new managers (played by Simon Callow and Ciaran Hinds). The Opera House has a lot of problems including a tempestuous prima donna named Carlotta (Minnie Driver) and a ghost who torments the opera folk, including the last manager. This "Phantom of the Opera" (Gerard Butler) has also, we're told, been tutoring an ingénue, named Christine Daae (Emmy Rossum), who just happens to have been the childhood sweetheart of Raoul.

Christine believes that her beloved dead father (or the "Angel of Music") has returned to her as this mysterious spirit. She's seduced by his talent and he becomes her Svengali. This is all complicated by the appearance of Raoul, creating a nifty love triangle for us, but it drives the Phantom insane. The only one who seems to know anything about the Phantom is Madam Giry, the mistress of the ballerinas. Her young daughter, Meg (the fetching Jennifer Elison), is Christine's friend.

While others are accusing the film version of being bombastic. I don't think it's bombastic enough and from the opening auction the film is in trouble. This Phantom shies away from its roots as a musical, having the auctioneer present the lots with all the enthusiasm of someone announcing that a white Toyota's lights are on in the church parking lot.

The camerawork, lighting and editing are uninspired as well.

The film is filled with long, wide shots during the musical numbers that are frustrating. Perhaps Webber was keen to avoid something like Moulin Rouge with its frantic edits and frequent close-ups. If so, Schumacher has accommodated him and then some. But we want to see the emotion on the characters' faces, not watch them walk stage left. At numerous points it feels like we've gone to the stage production, not the movie, and worse, we've purchased really bad seats. It's almost as if they were very concerned about the lip-synching and so continually pulled back.

This also may be the first musical to adopt the principles of Dogme 95 as well. Cinematographer John Mathieson has made sure that only natural lighting is used during the filming of Phantom. Of course, when a movie takes place largely in interior, not to mention subterranean settings, that means WE CAN'T SEE ANYTHING.

The film also chooses to flash forward several times to 1919. We know this is happening because the 1919 segments are filmed in black and white, like they are Nickleodeon flickers. This feeble device, which is supposed to have a payoff at the end, serves only to break up the boring events of 1870 with the even more boring, tintype events of 1919.

I'm not even going to go into the robot-man who takes center-stage in "Masquerade" or the Fosse-inspired ballet mimes in "Past the Point of No Return." But I have to say something about the cast. I hate to say this but Gerard Butler is an awful Phantom (picked again, according to reports, by Webber). His singing, which mostly involves his nasal cavity, irritates right off. One of the signature pieces, "Music of the Night," which is one of the Phantom's first bits, displays Butler's ability to vibrate the top of his palette when he gets to the consonant "n": "Night time sharpennnnnns, Heightens each sensationnnnnnn Darkness stirs, And wakes imaginationnnnnn." By the end of the number the chocolate coating on my bon-bons had been rattled off by the harmonics.

The Phantom, this time round, is given even more backstory, thus robbing him of some of his mystique while simultaneously NOT making us sympathize with him more.

Then there's the matter of his disfigurement, which here seems to be a bad case of eczema. In the production, and the Lon Chaney Phantom of the Opera which Andrew Lloyd Webber borrowed from gloriously, the Phantom is horrifying and repulsive when his theater mask is torn off. You can understand his deep shame and completely inability to reconcile with his own appearance. In Schumacher's version, he just needs a makeover (and a comb-over to hide that unsightly John Merrick thing on his left temple).

Patrick Wilson looks pained throughout. When he singing to Rossum, at one of those rare moments when Schumacher decides to actually get within 25 feet of them, his expression is strained, like he's just found out how much his car repairs are going to be. His singing is weak as well, but that doesn't seem to even be a qualifier for appearing in this film.

Emmy Rossum, however, is a fine Christine Daae. She is able to carry both the wide-eyed innocent and hot vixen elements of her role and she, unlike her counterparts, can sing.

When does good old Joel, the director of Batman Forever, actually make this movie work, at all? Why, the action sequences, of course. The strangling of Buquet is one of the few points that actually moves (and doesn't appear to have been shot from the balcony).

The strangling of Joel Schumacher is a completely crazy suggestion, but a quick blow to the solar plexus, for botching what would have appeared to be a no-lose project, seems warranted.